


Darling, I listen

by xaves



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Erik Lehnsherr as death, M/M, Side-character deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-09
Updated: 2012-10-09
Packaged: 2017-11-15 22:44:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/532597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaves/pseuds/xaves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles deals with death. Death buys him a drink.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darling, I listen

**Author's Note:**

> Based heavily off John Keats’ _Ode to a Nightingale_.

_But here there is no light._

The first time, it’s his father.

_I cannot see what flowers are at my feet._  
  
In the coffin, in the ground. An average day for putting a body into the earth like a planted seed.  
  
He stands alone among strangers, formal tie too tight on his neck, the small suit that’s tailored for the body of an 8 year old itching. The comforting words settle on his clothing like dust, the sympathetic stares brushed off. His hair is combed, his shoes shined, and he’s dressed to kill for a man now lying dead in a box.

He’s eight years old and he understands all too well.  
  
Charlie’s father is gone and Charlie doesn’t feel, because he does not know how. Not for this. He stands alone among the weeping strangers and children do not understand grief.  
  
He glances at his mother draped in her shades of mourning, too far away, wrapped in devastation like the bedsheets they had used to cover his father’s face not two mornings ago.  
  
He stands alone among strangers as his father is lowered in a box to the ground like a secret that the world wasn’t meant to see.  
  
He fidgets and hates it.

He’s eight years old and he lost his sadness somewhere on the way here. Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. _  
_

“Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.”   
  
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Without warning, a large hang engulfs his smaller one, fingers wrapped together. Charles looks up at the tall man beside him. A face he can’t remember, but eyes he won’t forget. He lacks the typical sadness, the uniform grief, the funeral toll. He is simply… _there_. He’s dark. Like the rest of the people around him. But his suit isn’t black. It’s pitch. It’s endless velvet and a sky without stars, a lack of light that makes you believe that you’re in a film that failed to capture in technicolor.  
  
His smile is warm. As are his hands.  
  
“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird.” The man murmurs, reaching down to brush fingertips over dry cheeks, his large shadow eclipsing Charles’s own small cast on the world. “No tears, Charlie.”   
  
He’s eight years old and he begins to shake. He doesn’t understand the words, nor does he know this stranger or why it feels like the sun is shining on their clasped fingers, but among the bodies, the breathing ones, the one beside him feels most like comfort.   
  
He fidgets again. “Okay.”  
  
“Don’t forget.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
It’s a promise he never intended to keep, but one that wound about him anyway, squeezed him tight and pinned him into the ground like a butterfly to a board. The tall man in the dark suit stood beside him and each thud of dirt being thrown over a box with a body with a face that no longer mattered didn’t hurt as much.

Clocks are broken in the moment that the final pat to the ground is given and the men with the shovels leave. Charles’s hand hangs warm by his side, his shadow playing alone behind him, picking up the promises left by the man and holding them close.  
  
He was eight years old and he watched his father be buried that day. But he didn’t stand alone.

…

It’s raining the second time. Seventeen year old Charles Xavier, saying goodbye to a friend whose time had withered up like the leaves of Autumn scattered around them, grey and cold.  
  
He has learned how to weep. He has learned the proper way of letting his insides be torn apart with grief like a knife. But his eyes are dry and his hands clenched into fists because for once, he knows this isn’t fair.

She was young. She was so young. The blushful Hippocrene.  
  
It can be taken with a grain of grim irony that they go to a bar to drink away the loss of a girl who had been taken by a pair of bright headlights and a man with a fondness for whiskey.

He’s seventeen and he sits in the corner, staring into his hands as the rain passes onward outside, making puddles thick as her hair, streaking the windows like windshields that cracked from the force of a body hitting it at 90 kilometers an hour.

They were both young. But he felt old now. And she felt dead.

He had stood with friends at the funeral. They had said their goodbyes in their dark suits and combed hair, proper gentlemen, lookin’ just like their daddies grown up.  But the idea of voices and clear-cut eyes repulse him when he wants nothing more than blur. Leave the world unseen. Fading away into the forest dim.  
  
He sits in silence and wonders what it feels like to be seventeen and getting a first-hand experience of asystole. Front row seats of algor mortis with a killer view, so to speak.

Charles’s brow knits into something akin to frustration when a large mug is pushed towards him.  
  
“You look like you could use the drink.” The man says quietly. A voice heard by emperor and clown.  
  
Darling, I listen.  
  
A face long forgotten with eyes that Charles could draw from memory.

“Hello, Charlie.”  
  
He stares down blankly at the beer and then back to the stranger whose coat could drape across nebulas and galaxies without effort. Could smother even the brightest of stars with its razor lapels and buttons made from tar. His shoes are coal, his tie a dark morning with chances of thunderstorms. His smile is nothing short of sunlight.

The unknown man hasn’t aged a day. He sits across from him at the tiny table. Bells ring and whisper forlorn.

Charles is seventeen and he trembles before death.  
  
“She was too young.” The younger boy takes the glass of alcohol into his hands and wonders if imbibing the depressant would be a particularly wise idea. For all he knew, he could get it into his head to drive a car directly into a girl only months away from entering university.

“She was the age she needed to be.”  
  
I listen.

That’s not an answer anyone would want to hear, and yet Charles swallows it down with his pint because he has to, shoulders shaking as he feels like a child again in need of a warm hand to hold his own. In response, the stranger reaches out. Charles is forced to set down the mug so that the stranger can carefully coax a large finger over the bony ridges of his knuckles. Each dip and rise is treated with reverence, the warm digit soothing over the skin that is far too thin, noticeably bony on a hand that is attached to a boy that hasn’t eaten properly in a month.

“No hungry generations tread thee down.” It is a whisper. Or maybe a prayer.

Then the hand that’s big enough to hold the world is at his cheek, smoothing over skin that’s dry, so very dry.

“I kept my promise.” Charles is seventeen and the promise is a rope around his chest, dark and thick.

There’s rain in his eyes and heat spreading over his arms, making his clothes itch and his head feel too small, his entire being too big for such a tiny space with such a terrible presence before him that would envelop planets on a whim.

“I know.”

When Charles gets up to leave, he leaves his umbrella at the bar.

It had stopped raining. Adieu, adieu.

…

Third time’s the charm.  
  
Best for last.  
  
His mother’s dead. Pale and ugly in a little brown box, buried into the dirt like a time capsule that people will forget to open.

Suit on, hair brushed. He wears blue, ignoring the black of propriety. Smile for the condolences. The grieving son, she would have been proud of you. Oh yes, she would have been proud. How strong he is, so brave. He’s alone now, isn’t he? Yes. Quite alone.

It’s easier that way. No one left to mourn. There’s no room left for others, for things - weariness, fever, and fret. He’s empty and drained and all the better for it. Not much left to pour out of a bottle that was tipped over and left on the floor years ago for someone to pick up.  
  
He feels like something rolled under the counter, pale and forgotten.

He feels like he might as well have been in that box with Sharon Xavier, decaying and stiff.

He feels sands of time settling on his shoulders. He feels tired.

I am become like dust and ashes.  
  
So, dirty and wispy with transparent motes hanging from his eyes, Charles is subjected to a reception. Impossible to escape, being as he is in his own house to start with. How very human to lock up the grieving family in a tiny box; all the more efficient for teary apologies and catered crab cakes to be passed out.

He’s placed in a sofa and feels little need to move, though no complaint would pass his lips if the cushions decided to envelop him for a while, to take him towhere youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.

But not quite. Raven makes sure he clicks on to smile in thanks, turns him off to rest, keeps a glass of wine in his hand for appearances, and for the most part, lets him run on stand-by at far end of the room. The sad little boy needs to look sad for all the sad little people, singing his little requiem, then it will be over and Charles will be free to forget forget forget.

Just an hour more, she swears, squeezing his shoulder as she bustles past, dealing with the guests herself, knowing the right words to say.

Charles is 25 years old and he’s on his third glass of white wine when Death sits beside him and takes the drink out of his grip, downing it in one go, then smiles. He has taken his hemlock, his numbness, emptied the dull opiate to the drains.

“Missed you at the burial.” Charles says without moving, eyes unshiftingly fixed on a point by the bookcases and the piano stool. All the same, he can sense the older man’s expression of amusement. Because he had been there. Flown on wings of Poesy, he had been there.

He will look the same. Just as he did 8 years ago, 17 years ago, thousands and thousands of years before and beyond, he will look the same. His own personal little Atropos.

No answer comes. Charles is forced to speak on, squeezing the thick words from his mouth. And finally, his gaze shifts to meet a stiff stare that he has seen in caskets.

He swallows back, then chokes, then-

“Please.”  
  
It’s a defeat. A collapse. An absolute. Arms come around to embrace; strong and warm as his hands, thick as night. Charles sinks in and breaks. No more.

His toes curl, his hands clench, and his entire face aches as everything buckles down into tears streaking down his face, absorbing into a thick wool coat that is too dark and hard to possibly be this sweet for someone this wretched, this tainted, this fragmented. He has lived to this point, no more, no more.

Charles Xavier cries on Death’s shoulder, and Death holds him, fingers in his hair, palms at his cheeks, murmuring, murmuring, hush now.

I listen, I listen.

He moves. Lapels, buttons, pushing, pulling, anything. They shift, darkness lifting him through an empty house and a ground of nightingales to replace the voice of simple, crude human, whose dull brain perplexes.

Do I wake or sleep?

His words take the thoughts and throw them to air, and Death is all the same, towering over him, shedding his cloak.

“No vision or waking dream.”

He’s so very human under all the finery.  
  
Him. Here. There. Now. Alive. So very much alive. Let’s be alive.

His soul pours out in gasps and shivers, in tears, in bare bodies clutched together, one unchanging, the other as subject to seasons as leaves or flies.

They fill. They empty. Then fill again as the sands filter down, unnoticed, unimportant.

“Sing for me. Sing.”

Voices clutch and twine into whispers, but still.

I listen.

—

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

“I am not Death.”

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

“I am far less complicated than that.”

To take into the air my quiet breath.

“My name is Erik.”

Charles sits up amongst wrinkles and sleep-muss. He is twenty five years old and he cannot stop himself being eight, being seventeen, from feeling a hand in his that radiates like sunshine.

He sits in bed and faces his grim reaper.

He’s twenty-five years old and he was not born for death.

Death was born for him.

To listen.


End file.
